Leave it to the former Johnny Rotten to damn the fest before he even arrives. "I've not done that one," he admits. "But it's very corporate. Festivals aren't what I was brought up with. They're too structured, too organized, and it's really more about people sitting down in deck chairs."

"Oh, that's not what this is," I countered with a tone suggesting he should know better. This is a Goldenvoice production, after all -- and corporate or not, John Lydon and the L.A. concert promoter go way back, to the scrappy early gigs of his second, longer-lasting and (in my opinion) better band, Public Image Ltd. Surely there's some fond feelings there.

"Yes, well, I doubt that it's the mucky pop we used to call British festivals. It's not like sitting in the rain and the mud and the snow. It's just the organization and the structure of it. I'm always wary of that, of looking a bit too corporate.

"But listen, this is PiL -- we make it our own universe, whether we're playing to 200 people in (bleep-bleep) Iowa or 200,000 … which I have done from time to time, in certain European countries … it's all the same. It's a different approach, but you make it enjoyable, you're there to do the best you can, and share the joy.

"And if people don't like you very much -- then you share that."

We'll see how much Coachellans take to Public Image come late Friday night, though during the group's 11:20-12:10 time slot Lydon has some stiff competition from Jay-Z on the main (starting at 10:50, though why do I bet he's late?), the theatrical and often masked Swedish enterprise Fever Ray in the Mojave tent (11:10-12:20) and a lengthy set in Sahara from deadmau5 (11:35-12:50).

Ahead of that, however, comes tonight's lengthier PiL performance at Club Nokia, the first of several Coachella previews this week and a gig that now stands as the group's first performance in North America in nearly 18 years, since Lydon put the project on hiatus following 1992's That What Is Not. (Limited tickets, $35.50, are still available.) He has re-formed it with two members from his sterling mid-'80s lineup, sound-shaper Lu Edmonds and drummer Bruce Smith, as well as bassist Scott Firth.

Why resurrect Public Image Ltd. now? What will happen after this Coachella appearance and brief tour afterward? I caught up with the group's spearhead late Monday afternoon to get some answers ... as well as a passing thought about the late Malcolm McLaren, for whom the one-of-a-kind singer has had little love in the decades since the former Sex Pistols manager pulled off his own great rock 'n' roll swindle of that band.

"I thought you were especially gracious about Malcolm in your statements." Recall that the 10 1/2-minute "Albatross," the stark opening sprawl from PiL's seminal second assortment Metal Box, has been viewed as an angry diatribe directed at him. "You could have been very nasty."

"No, no, I don't like that," explained Lydon, 54, his notorious outspokenness often mistakenly branding him a troublemaker with no feelings. "I tell it like it is, from the heart -- and in death always try to remember the best first. He was many things, but he was many good things also."

You've always said that Public Image was merely on hiatus all these years. But what sparked your interest to finally return to it?

The finances were appropriated entirely correctly, and that enabled me to structure this entire operation. To put together a band like PiL requires an enormous amount of money, because there are all kinds of considerations -- least of all rehearsals, which anyone should know don't come cheap.

The lack of record company involvement or interest has been utterly appalling. But I must say that comes as no surprise to me, because when I first started PiL, right from its outset, the record company was amazingly distant and quite negative about it all. Public Image for me has always been a financial struggle to make ends meet.

I remember you mentioning in the liner notes to the retrospective Plastic Box that those early albums were mostly recorded on the fly, whenever free studio time would become available.

Yeah, well, they never made money available to us for rehearsal or to record properly, so we'd just be ringing up friends of friends and finding out what studio is available for a couple of hours. Run in, knock a few tunes down, and run out. Not much has changed! But I don't want this to come across as "oh, poor me," because it's not. Adversity is actually a very useful tool, and one that's close to my heart. The bigger the problems are, well then the greater the solution required.

Yes, but why revisit PiL in the first place?

Because there's a whole bunch of new material to be recorded, and we need to go out live first to raise the funds, the appropriate funds, to be able to get ourselves into a recording position, and then release on a proper label. We can't go out and perform new songs straight away, because we'd be unprotected. We'd have no copyright control. And over the 30 years I've been in the music industry, the one thing I can guarantee you is that everybody loves to copy me! So, even though they're breaking copyright-control law all the time now, I'd still rather be in that position than to give it to 'em on a platter.

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